Free The Empty Warrior by J. D. McCartney

his olive drab savior drumming repetitively on his opiate salved mind. He hadn’t an inkling that he was headed back to the World.

CHAPTER FOUR:
    Hell on Wheels
    2011 A.D.
    He sat in his chair, its wheels locked, anchored before his computer, watching as subject lines and senders popped up in his inbox. Suddenly a familiar name appeared amidst the strangers advertising weight loss, male enhancement, mortgage refinancing, and pornography; a Bill Verba. O’Keefe sneered crookedly; it was the closest thing to a smile he could manage. He hadn’t had many reasons to smile in a very long time.
    “Okay,” he said to no one, “let’s see what you’ve got for me today, Colonel.” Verba was army—career army. O’Keefe had met him in a stateside hospital during rehab, and they still kept in touch despite the years. But this contact was no friendly missive. This was yet another round in their unremitting battles.
    O’Keefe opened the game folder, inserted the e-mail, and started the simulation. The screen immediately filled with an overview of a barren piece of snow-covered Russian landscape, circa early 1944. A road ran horizontally across the north side of the map while a deep stand of trees ran north to south on the east side, bisecting the road.
    O’Keefe’s German units occupied the western and more open side of the screen. Most of them were placed atop two hills that were the dominating features on that side of the map. The only enemy units he could see were two burning Russian tanks that sat astride the road as it exited the forest. O’Keefe had destroyed them previously with some Mark IVs that were dug in along a short swale west of the trees, and two eighty-eights he had positioned on the northernmost hilltop.
    He cycled the turn button, chuckling to himself as more than a dozen T-34s clanked out of the woods south of where their wrecked counterparts sat in flames. “Oh, you army puke, you,” he breathed, shaking his head. “You are so predictable. I knew that first move was a feint; I knew you would never try to force the road.” O’Keefe’s hunch as to where Verba’s main assault would come had paid off. He had taken the chance of leaving the road, the easiest path to victory; relatively unprotected. All of his Tigers were dug in on the southernmost hill, directly overlooking the spot where the T-34s were exiting the trees. His best tanks were in perfect firing position.
    Yet still he stared at the monitor indecisively. The colonel may have been predictable, but the man was good. He was sending what looked like the entirety of what remained of his forces directly toward the high ground to the west because he knew something would be up there, he just wasn’t sure what. If O’Keefe opened fire immediately, Verba might simply withdraw back into the trees with minimal losses and the knowledge of where O’Keefe’s Tigers were dug in and camouflaged. And if he attempted to move them after the T-34s retreated, there was always the possibility that Verba could catch them in open ground if he anticipated O’Keefe’s move and returned directly to the attack.
    But if O’Keefe waited until Verba was unalterably committed to the advance, that might work in the colonel’s favor as well. Waiting might make it impossible for O’Keefe’s heavily outnumbered force to disable enough of the Russian tanks to even the odds before the T-34s advanced far enough to negate the advantages his Wehrmacht machines held in both range and accuracy. If that happened the battle would be lost, early and decisively. Perhaps , O’Keefe thought, I should wait to fire and then retreat, fighting a delaying action.
    He was still debating what course of action to take when both his dogs suddenly and nearly simultaneously erupted into frenzied barking from what sounded like to O’Keefe to be the living room. The abruptness of their outburst caused him to flinch noticeably. A string of fireworks lit surreptitiously behind his chair